Tom Gleeson didn’t ‘break’ the Gold Logie
Tom Gleeson didn’t “break” the Gold Logie. No, the Gold Logie died in 2016, the year The Project’s Waleed Aly, a TV newbie, won it for one four-minute speech — posted online, writes Annette Sharp.
Opinion
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Like Garry McDonald — aka Norman Gunston — the last ABC personality to win a Gold Logie 43 years ago, I couldn’t be arsed when invited to head to the Gold Coast to cover the 2019 Logies.
Cynical, apathetic, over it — I have been banging on for years about how the Logies have lost relevance and are in desperate need of an overhaul.
But major sponsors Nine and TV Week, deaf to feedback, plod on with their old fraught structure, confused by the gratification that comes with a surge in online coverage and a two-day orgy of photo gallery clicks.
It’s been years since the Logies have been relevant or fun — and if you look at the list of Gold Logie winners from the past four years, you can see clearly when public apathy overturned the ship after the voting public mutinied having realised the awards had become a hijackable joke — although in truth that had been happening by degrees over almost two decades.
Maybe it began when TV production budgets started drying up and young viewers realised they were not being catered for by a medium that put revenue earnings ahead of creative risk and broadcasting adventure.
When perhaps when reality shows proliferated at the expense of everything else.
Or maybe it began 30 years earlier still when Logie nominees began employing staff to buy up boxes of copies of TV Week to prejudice the vote and artificially swing it in their favour.
What is certain is that Hard Quiz host Tom Gleeson didn’t “break” the Gold Logie.
That death occurred in the years before Gleeson prostituted himself across all media to prove you could rig Gold Logie voting with a concentrated campaign.
It happened before he did it a year earlier for Grant Denyer, a man then without a TV show on Channel 10, and even before cancer campaigner Samuel Johnson won it in 2017 for a two-night turn as Molly Meldrum in a woeful TV miniseries — although there’s little question of Johnson’s popularity on TV. We saw that this year when he won Dancing With The Stars — not because he was the best dancer on the floor (that was easily Shane Jenek aka Courtney Act) — but because his on-camera interviews were so strange, so worryingly compelling, we, the audience, couldn’t look away.
Viewers voted for Johnson on that program, I am sure, out of concern; What might happen if they didn’t?
No, the Gold Logie died in 2016 the year The Project’s Waleed Aly, a TV newbie, won it for one four-minute speech — posted online — in which he criticised ISIL’s November 2015 attack on Paris.
The speech was a strong statement from a moderate Muslim man against extremist attacks — but it had nothing to do with great television entertainment or presenting.
And right there and then, the Gold Logie would be taken away from those people who might actually work hard enough to deserve it.
From Amanda Keller and Lisa Wilkinson, Julia Morris and Rodger Corser, Noni Hazlehurst and Peter Helier and others.
In the current environment TV professionals can no longer win the industry’s greatest prize.
The fact that they even go to the trouble of dressing up for the Logies shows us they take the award seriously — too seriously — and the award today is not for people who take the job seriously and devote themselves to the industry.
It’s for the one who takes the piss the best.
And it’s given to the best campaigner.
Roxy Jacenko, who has a new reality show in the works, would now have to be odds on early favourite to win the 2020 Gold Logie.
Not because she’s any good at making television — but because she knows, better than most, how to manipulate social media and make people think she’s popular.
And frankly, she’s the winner the passive self-appointed industry awards caretaker, Nine, deserves.
